Second Life

I see you Alohagirl. Yes, you sitting at the Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune room. For an Alohagirl, you seem to be looking very manly today.

If you were a celebrity, I would say you looked like Eric, the biker guy from the Village People. Yeah, you evoke that kind of style. But hey, if that’s your thing. That’s your thing.

It seems that everyone is getting into the avatar business nowadays. Nintendo kicked it off with its popular Miis. Microsoft joined the bandwagon with the aptly named Avatars. But by far, the most ambitious avatar system has to be Sony’s PlayStation Home.

It’s been a long time in the making and there’s a reason for that says Paul Purdy, the project manager for PlayStation Network. The program has been delayed because Sony wanted to make development tools for the back end, he said. It sounds as if they wanted to make it easier for others developers to make special rooms for games just like Uncharted.

The idea of spaces seemed to be the theme for whole demonstration. The look of Sony’s virtual world has changed a lot. The areas seem to be more open. I saw a new central plaza and a player’s own personal apartment, where you can change wall paper and add furniture. (Some extras may cost money. Dirty microtransactions.) Unfortuntely, you can’t change the view outside a player’s apartment (as of now).

Sony finally showed off a little more of the often-delayed Home. The online world was originally introduced last year at the Game Developers Conference. Since then, it has hit a couple of snags but SCEA chief Jack Tretton swears the final product will be great.

“I absolutely assure you that it will be worth it,” he said. “Itâ€™s the binding network. It will provide the ultimate social experience for gamers.”

In the meantime, we got to watch this trailer, which featured among other things better environments. The world of Home looks a lot better since the last time I saw it. There’s actually an identity to it. I can see cityscapes and new rooms. It wasn’t some weird pseudopavilion. I swear the first time I saw Home’s environments it was like watching Defending Your Life.

The biggest news was that Home would support themed rooms for games. They showed one for Resistance 2and another for what looked like Warhawk. They basically resemble a Disney-fied version of the games.

The Resistance room had memorabilia from the game and players were examining things like a Chimeran enclosed in a plastic tube. There were exposed wires everywhere and people’s avatars were wandering around like it was nothing. These rooms also seem to serve another purpose. From the trailer, it looks like they serve as a gateway into a game with a group of players.